Özet:

This article establishes Richard Nixon as a vital figure in the development of literary characterization in the United States from the late-twentieth to early-twenty-first centuries. During Nixon’s lifetime, tension between postmodernist and realist modes of representation dominated the U.S. literary landscape. As portrayals of Nixon in literature evolved from those of caricature to those of serious characterization, the figure of Nixon as a liberal subject—that is, a subject capable of being represented realistically in fiction, a character with a fully-developed consciousness who can evoke sympathy—offered ambitious novelists a device for narrowing broad, social themes into a psychological context and for widening local, psychological spaces into a historical context. In establishing the trajectory of the Nixonian trope in U.S. literature, this article examines plays and novels by Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, A.M Homes, Don DeLillo, and others

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